RISOGRAPH PRINTS + PROJECTS

As the Risograph machine shifts loudly out of idle mode, warming up its whirring interior and prepares to emit a series of prints, it generates a physical, anticipatory wonder. Our attraction to these clunky machines is rooted in how they signal of, and resonate with, our human entanglement with infrastructure. There is a familiarity about the Riso machines that appears at the level of waves. Their hum is not unlike the rumbling of massive bridges or the low-grade shaking felt from construction through walls and foundations of the built environment.

For the past 20 years we've been drawn to, and learning from, large scale land-altering projects. We've been humbled by their deep time alterations of the earth. The physicality of the Riso machine, its process and tactile form (the need to lift and move drums and boxes of prints, transport reams of paper) feels like an appropriate match with the human labor of making.

Riso’s vivid blasts of color, random outcomes and misalignments suit the aesthetic of the material world that we aim to render present through our work. We seek to dispatch image-sensations of lively co-existence with a constantly changing and materially evolving cosmos. Riso is the ideal medium of communication for this content. Through Riso’s relatively small environmental footprint — and the ability of the work created to be shared and distributed among many people across great distances — we feel an inexplicable joy as the machine shoots out singularities:  images of swirling and cracking geology, solar flares, eclipses, star nebulae and floating cups of tea. To witness these machines emitting such imagery with both resilience and precarity is to experience a temporary rebalancing of human and nonhuman things—a social/environmental act.

As many Riso artists know, to step out into the light of day or night after several hours of working with these machines is to enter a changed world. Colors punch, leap and layer. Objects and forms reorganize, riff music-like, and dance in a poetics of geometry and space.

Through the lens of Riso, the world of objects is relieved of assigned narratives and human purposes. Objects reveal their potential to be mixed and remixed into surprising things that appear more tangible and real, while also more withdrawn from capture.

We invite you to collect this work.

Each print is 8.5” x 11” and $10USD + shipping. To purchase a print, please email smudgestudio@gmail.com.

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